A tanker truck spilled thousands of gallons of oil onto Warren Street and Fourth Avenue after smashing into a cement barrier Saturday afternoon.
“Oil started spilling out like crazy,” said Troy Gilberti, who saw the incident while he was walking with his daughter, Faith. “It was like a waterfall.”
The truck was turning from Fourth Avenue onto Warren Street at around noon when it clipped a cement divider, which punctured the truck’s tank, according to authorities.
Tankers of that size hold a maximum 3,000 gallons of gasoline, and a firefighter at the scene claimed the rupture had nearly emptied it.
More than a 60 firefighters and hazardous materials experts responded to the scene, closing off the surrounding blocks and using vacuums to collect the spill off the street, although some of it cascaded into nearby sewers.
The incident caused no injuries, according to a firefighter.
A spokesman for the Department of Environmental Protection, Edward Timbers, claimed that the spill made its way into nearby man holes and an adjacent construction site, and that the trucking company hired an environmental cleanup company to cleanup the remaining fuel.
None of the oil made its way into the Gowanus Canal, Timbers said.
